Chapter 1 The Burned Village
Ash still floated in the air when Aelin stepped over the broken gate.
It drifted like black snow, clinging to her hair, settling on her boots, whispering across the ruins that had once been her home. The smell hit her next smoke, charred wood, and the faint iron tang of blood that no amount of wind could scatter.
She stopped breathing for a moment.
Not because she needed to, her magic had trained her to endure far worse, but because she didn’t want to taste the destruction. Didn’t want to accept it.
“Mother?” Her voice cracked. “Tarin? Anyone?”
Silence answered.
The healer’s satchel at her hip suddenly felt useless full of herbs and salves meant for the living. She tightened her grip on it as she stepped deeper between houses she recognized only by their foundations. The roofs had collapsed inward. Walls had melted into soot-streaked skeletons.
Her village had been erased.
She knelt beside what had once been the well, now filled with rubble and ash. Aelin pressed her hand against the stone rim and inhaled, grounding herself. Magic flickered at her fingertips soft, gold, desperate.
A scrying spell.
Please let someone be alive.
Golden light trickled into the cracks of the well, seeking, searching, reaching
Nothing.
Her breath shuddered out. She bowed her head.
She had left for only two days. Two. She had gone into the forest to collect feverroot for an ill child. When she returned…
A Dominion attack. There was no other explanation.
Boot prints confirmed it the military issue, deep in the dirt, large enough to belong to armored soldiers. The infamous black-metal greaves of the Nightfang Dominion left sharp-edged impressions no villager could mimic.
Her fists curled. Heat rose behind her ribs, magic answering her grief with a pulse of dangerous energy.
She stood.
And she would have let that fury loose on the world
if she hadn’t heard the moan.
Aelin dropped to a crouch instantly, sweeping the air with her hand until her magic brushed against a flicker of life. She ran toward it, heart hammering.
Behind the fallen bakery, half-buried under timber, lay Old Mira, the midwife. Her gray braid was coated in soot; her breaths were shallow, wet.
“Mira!” Aelin slid to her knees and pressed glowing hands against the woman’s chest. “Stay with me.”
The old woman’s eyes fluttered open. “Aelin… child… you shouldn’t have come back…”
“I always come back.” Her voice trembled. “What happened? Who did this?”
Mira coughed, blood staining her lips. Aelin channeled magic into her, knitting torn tissue, clearing the smoke from her lungs. But Mira pushed her hands weakly away.
“No time… Listen.” Her voice was a rasp. “They were… searching… Searching for the girl with golden magic.”
Aelin froze. “Me?”
“The Dominion commander… tall, black armor, silver eyes…” Mira swallowed. “He ordered the village burned when you were not found.”
A tall commander with silver eyes.
Aelin had heard the stories
Kyrin Nightfang.
Prince of the Dominion.
The Shadow Heir.
Known for leaving scorched villages in his wake.
Her stomach twisted.
“He said,” Mira whispered, “‘bring her to me.’”
Aelin steadied her shaking hands. “Mira, please. Let me heal…”
“No.” The woman’s hand clamped around Aelin’s wrist with surprising strength. “Run. He is looking for you still.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“You must.” Mira’s gaze sharpened with fierce clarity. “The prophecy… child, the prophecy…”
Aelin leaned closer. “What prophecy?”
But Mira exhaled one last trembling breath. Her eyes glazed, body sinking into stillness.
Aelin bowed her head as the old woman’s warmth faded into the cold ash.
For a long moment, she couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. The crackling of distant smoldering embers filled the quiet. The world was too still too wrong.
Then she lifted her head.
Her eyes no longer shimmered gold. They burned.
She stood, wiped her tears with the back of her hand, and scanned the horizon.
If Prince Kyrin Nightfang wanted her
He would regret ever finding her.
Aelin cinched the straps of her satchel, slipped a dagger from an overturned soldier’s corpse, and stepped beyond the ruins.
The trees whispered as she entered the forest.
Behind her, in the drifting ash, a single set of fresh boot prints followed her own
large, deep, unmistakable.
She wasn’t alone in the forest.
Not anymore.
